Opinion Our Hackable Political Future

Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, "surfaces" video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. It is soon debunked as a fake, the product of a user-friendly video application that employs generative adversarial network technology to convincingly swap out one face for another. It is the summer of 2019, and the story, predictably, has stuck around -- part talk-show joke, part right-wing talking point. "It's news," political journalists say in their own defense.